Why me? Why NOT?!

Deb Brock Discovery, Mental, Opportunity, Spiritual , , , , , , , ,

September 16, 2013:   Why me?  Why NOT?!

A most wonderful woman returned to my office this week after not seeing her for close to 13 years.  Long story short, she was dealing with “how good life is” and what is wrong with that?  Funny, I thought, here is a woman who, after having gone through three years of intense psychotherapy to deal with a life threatening depression originating out of some very complex early life issues, would now come back to therapy because, in short, life is too good.  Something must be wrong.

I reviewed her old chart, ran through the check list with all things tallying in the positive.  She finished raising her children all of whom are independently successful and content.  Her one and only (long term) husband and she are happier than they have ever been.  She is enjoying financial advancement as well as administrative and peer recognition at work for her professional contribution.  And, of course, I checked the old trauma material we had processed a decade plus ago and it is long dissipated, no longer in her mental and or emotional awareness.  Hurrah!  Kaplah (as the Klingons would say)!  Mercy, what needs to be wrong for this picture to be safe?  That was the point.  Quite simply there is nothing wrong.  Does something need to be wrong???

With cautious disclosure I told her of my working hypothesis: she is suffering from a form of survivor’s guilt.  Her eyes got big, she trickled a tear and nodded her head.  Life was simply too good.  She admitted that her brother, a long term friend, and a co-worker, were all currently suffering from either a failed marriage, dissatisfying job, or lack of physical health.  So why should she be so content?  I took advantage of the opportunity to ask if she knew Nelson Mandela, which of course she did and easily verbalized the quality of his life’s contribution.  I quoted from his 1994 Inaugural speech (which I have posted in my office just at the base of my monitor for quick reference): “We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?  Actually, who are you NOT to be?  You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the World”.  Another tear trickled down her face, a slight biting of her lower lip and again, the slight head nod.  This is about gratitude, I said, not about worthiness or comparison.  I suggested she work on noting appreciation, which, by its nature, circulates and spreads goodness and quality compared to fear of goodness which comes out of false pride (I shouldn’t have it so good because someone else is suffering).  We agreed to work together for a spell of time with a concerted focus on enjoying and appreciating the goodness with which her current life is so richly endowed.

Wow, how cool is that?

~Dr Deb

Pieces of Truth

Deb Brock Mental, Spiritual , , , ,

Most people who know me have already heard me say time and again that “truth is safe…it doesn’t have to be easy or likable, but it is always safe”.  Not only is truth safe, truth is vibrant and evolutional.  Truth is never stagnant.  The trick is to trust the pieces of truth as they come to us. Consider this easy formula: bits of truth lead to big truth, big truths lead to full truth. Truth is often incremental, this way.

Incremental truth or, pieces of truth are like stepping stones over a rapid river.  They serve as a passage over a space that is too large to jump over all at once.  We know we want to get to the other side where the larger or full truth resides, but we have to take it one step at a time.  Otherwise we never get across the river or we might drown trying.

Most of the time truth is emotionally discovered, but that doesn’t mean that the initial emotion is the final truth (one stepping stone does not get us across the wide river).  If we are too afraid to explore pieces of emotional truth as we experience them, we run the risk of stagnation because we might not like the moment of emotion we are experiencing and stay on this side of the river, or we do like the emotional and misinterpret it as the desired shore line.

Sometimes the big truth is too much for one giant leap. By trusting the small bits, we become enabled to face the big ones.   When we step on one truth stone at a time, we can more readily trust the next stone upon which we step and then the next, until we have crossed the river.  Looking back, we can see how clear the passage was.  But such is the beauty of truth, it requires trust and boldness to move forward without knowing the full of it at the onset.  Truth will, when acknowledged, give us a broader view, a wider perspective, and more room in which we can discover what comes next.

Trust truth.  Truth is honorable. Truth will always lead you forward.  Cool!

~Dr Deb

Meandering

Ron Johnson Uncategorized , , , ,

Deb and I have just come back from…meandering. We were in “the Southwest” of the country visiting various canyons and Native American cliff dwellings and the like. This, like most of our travels are begun with a general thought or direction followed by a commitment to…meander. We stop, stay, leave, go, and even return as our collective heart desires. Meandering works for us most of the time as we are usually able to find a motel that can accommodate our travel style. Occasionally, we get stuck having to sleep in an undesirable Motel 1 or pay an outlandish price for finding the last bed in the resort hotel. Still, we are willing to pay the price of a cheapy motel or an expensive motel because it serves our traveling style. Besides, most of the time when we travel we are looking for “hiking and history” so our accommodations are not particularly important.

The word meander comes from the Greek word for river: meandros. We learned that while we were meandering through Greece eight years ago. Because we often travel off season our meandering style works pretty well because we aren’t competing with a lot of other tourists. But we had to deal with the chilly nights in Greece in February where heat in the winter is some kind of four-letter word for the Greeks (and most Europeans, I think). And frankly, there is a lot more meandering in southern Europe (Italy, Spain, Greece, etc.) than there is in northern Europe and the U.S. We’ve meandered through Italy, the Northwest, and the national parks in the Rockies area. When we first lived in Newfoundland, Canada, we meandered all over the island and came to understand that we had traveled more on the Newfoundland island than most Newfoundlanders, who are, by the way, also meanderers, usually on the sea.

Meandering can be seen as a style of life or a style of personality. A good way to understand meandering is to consider it on a continuum of boundaries. Meandering tends to be done by people who are wide/low boundary people compared to people who are narrow/high boundary people. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator-II (MBTI) identifies meanderers as “P” people and more planful people as “J” people. Actually the P stands for “perception” and the J for “judgment,” which means that so-called P people like to gather information (perceive) and J people like to evaluate (or judge) information. Since we need both to gather information and to evaluation information, it is obvious that both perceiving and judging are necessary in life. It tends to be, however, that most people are pretty strongly one way or the other. Both Deb and I are “P people,” and hence meanderers.

Learning and living with both wide/low boundary (P) elements of life and people in life as well as narrow/high boundary (J) elements of life and people can be of immense benefit. There is great value in both of these ways of life, but these differences can cause equally immense difficulties, especially if significant others are different in this boundary orientation. Furthermore, there are dangers to both, like not being able to find a suitable motel if you are meandering, or having all your motels lined up ahead of time only to have your car break down 100 miles short of your planned motel stay.